Have no idea how to write a 500 word personal reflective piece for english

[vanroevan1994]

For our holiday homework we were given instructions to write a 500 worded personal reflective piece on what 'encountering conflict' means to us. Thing is, I am currently horrible at english essay types of questions and have no idea where to start or how to write it.
Any help would be great! thanks 

[pi]

edit: don't read, assumed incorrectly that you were referring to a 500 word written explanation... I'll leave this here anyway for anyone interested though


This is what our school tells us to do:

For each text you produce, you are required to provide a written explanation discussing and analysing decisions about your choices of form, purpose, audience, context and language.

In addition, you are also required to reflect on the ways your texts have been informed by discussion of the texts studied. You are to analyse how you have drawn upon the ideas and stylistic features of the texts and the choices you have made from these for the creation of your own texts.

When reflecting about the language choices you have made in your own texts, you could consider, for example:
- narrative voice, including first person and third person narration
- vocabulary choices, including synonyms
- use of metaphor and imagery
- sentence structures and clauses
- verb tenses
- ways of naming characters
- use of dialogue
- speech making strategies, including repetition of clauses, phrases, words

You could also reflect on the process of creating your texts, for example:
- decisions about effective introductions
- selecting key ideas in developing an argument
- using other texts as models for your own texts
- decisions about layout for a web-site or magazine
- rewriting texts after receiving feedback from audiences
- decisions to omit parts of a text or change its focus

[aabattery]

Okay... 500 wds isn't too much. You could brainstorm on different areas stemming off 'encountering conflict' and talk about what conflict is, our reactions to conflict, why conflict is important, how conflicts are resolved... etc. Keep on asking yourself questions about this topic...
You could think of examples of conflicts and reflect on the reactions of different sides of a conflict and what they learned from it/ how they were impacted from it.

However if I were you, I would try finding a visual representation (eg. a photo/picture) of a conflict (google images helps) - for instance, a scene of the pearl harbour attack, the twin towers attack, or even a family dispute/relationship break-down. Even more abstract scenes such as a person crying with their head in their hands or a person with an obvious disability shows conflict in its physical and psychological manifestations...
Take a good look at your chosen picture, and perhaps write a creative piece, taking the role of a person within that scene. Put yourself into that person's shoes as if you are encountering that conflict. What are your emotions as you undergo this tribulation? What are your thoughts? What do you feel like doing? (perhaps revenge... etc.) But finally, try coming to a resolution - What have you learnt from this conflict? What character have you gained? How has an stronger inner will been forged etc...?
That's what I would do, but obviously there are many other ways of tackling this. A personal reflective piece is quite a wide text type so it could encompass this, if I'm not mistaken.

Hope that helps and sorry if I rambled a little - english is all about getting your thoughts down on paper... Good luck with it

[Camo]

Excellent starting point would be this:
http://www.vcestudyguides.com/guides/context/encountering-conflict